Red Bull once again had to place themselves behind Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari on Friday’s training session in Baku, but still sees room for improvement. After his best time in the first session, Sergio Pérez was again able to land in front of team-mate Max Verstappen and finished second (+0.248 seconds), the championship leader was third (+0.356).
However, Verstappen was not able to set a really competitive lap time today because yellow flags kept preventing him from doing so. In the second session, it was teammate Pérez who was in the run-off zone in turn 15, so Verstappen had to abandon his attempt.
“I had some bad luck with my runs on soft tires because I got a yellow flag every time,” says Verstappen. “I had to step back, but in general we look pretty good,” he says. “It looks like Ferrari is pretty quick again on one lap, but on the long run it’s more balanced.”
The Dutchman speaks of “not a bad day” on which Red Bull only had to fine-tune a few small things, although he could hardly do a long run himself: “Three laps, so quite long,” he jokes.
DRS system was not working at first
“But I don’t think it will matter much. You get an idea. Of course you don’t know the exact tire degradation, but I think we have enough information to see which direction we want to go with the tires.” , according to Verstappen.
He only had minor problems at the beginning of the second session. The World Champion was late on the track because his team was still working on the DRS system and needed to fix something. The team doesn’t say exactly what was wrong with that, but in the first session the top flap flapped quite a lot in the wind.
“They tried to fix it,” says Verstappen, “but I didn’t hear anything about it in the second practice session, so I guess it should work.”
Pérez: “We have to keep going”
Despite his second place, team-mate Pérez wasn’t quite as pleased with the second practice: “It didn’t go as well as we would have liked. I think we took a few wrong directions,” he says. “We just tried things, but it just didn’t work and we couldn’t sort out our problems.”
At least Pérez comes to Azerbaijan with a healthy dose of self-confidence. The Mexican recently won the Monaco race and rewarded himself with a new contract with Red Bull. He also travels to Baku as last year’s winner.
You can definitely feel the new self-confidence in the car, especially since he also felt quite comfortable in the car – apart from a few bumps in braking zones, which not only caught him on the wrong foot one or the other time. “But that’s how it is at the moment,” he says. “We have to work hard and then hopefully we’ll be able to solve it.”
“At least we have good tire data that we can work our way through for tomorrow,” continued the Mexican. “But Ferrari looked strong, especially in the second sector and in the corners. We still have to find something there if we want to fight tomorrow.”